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STORY MUSGRAVE

FORMER ASTRONAUT

Story Musgrave is one of NASA’s most experienced astronauts. With a 30 year career spanning the Apollo era of the 1960s right through to the Space Shuttle program of the 1990s, he is the only astronaut to have flown on all five Space Shuttles. He is also a pilot, surgeon, mechanic, poet and philosopher.

The experiences of a small child growing up on a 1000 acre dairy farm in Massachusetts provided a foundation for Story’s fascination with machinery as well as his extraordinary love of nature. Born 19 August 1935 during the Great Depression, by the age of 10, Story was already operating and repairing tractors and farm machinery. However, in a childhood which was marred by alcohol and abuse, Story and his two brothers led an isolated life, and it was to nature that Story turned to escape the dysfunctional world around him.

For Story, his experiences in space were the epitome of his childhood exploration and discovery of nature. It was the child who is totally immersed in a strange and wonderful environment, who finds new perspective in the experience. For Story, each successive spaceflight was to become richer and richer.

During the years from 1967 through to 1989, Story continued to work as a part-time trauma surgeon at the Denver General Hospital and as a part-time professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Kentucky Medical Center. He also began a decade of study in the humanities and completed a Master of Arts degree in literature.

Throughout his career with NASA, Story enriched his experiences with his ongoing studies and by capturing the essence of spaceflight through a variety of mediums including photography, poetry and personal experiments. He was the first astronaut to photograph Uluru (Ayer’s Rock), Mt Everest and the Egyptian pyramids from space, and to demonstrate the behaviour of consumer products like Coca Cola in zero gravity. He also studied the psychological responses of performing certain tasks in various orientations. On each spaceflight, Story carried a little black book with typically over one hundred creative things to do in space.

Story retired from NASA in 1997. Today he shares his many unique experiences through performances across the USA and internationally. He is a popular guest of the Astronaut Encounter Program at the Kennedy Space Center and also consults for Walt Disney Imagineering and Applied Minds Inc. in their research and development divisions. He is an advocate and visionary for the continual exploration of space and the author of numerous scientific papers on a diverse range of topics including aerospace medicine, exercise physiology, temperature regulation and clinical surgery. His recreational interests include flying, photography, scuba diving, parachuting, gardening and running.